Detective Bowles was sitting up a little straighter. I definitely had his attention. “How did she know that?”
“She told me that Jimmy stopped for the night at a truckstop in Reno. He sat down in a big booth in the restaurant to have a bite to eat, and about twenty minutes into his meal a little girl sat up across from him. She had apparently been asleep on the far side of this big round booth, and he hadn't even seen her there. He offered the little girl his french fries. She didn't cry, but she was hungry and ate everything he gave her. He ended up sitting there with her, hoping someone would claim her.” I looked up at Detective Bowles whose eyes had grown wide, jumping to the obvious conclusion.
“You would have to know Jimmy. He definitely walked to a different drum. He didn't live like other people lived, and he definitely didn't respond they way someone else would have responded. He was kind, but he was also reserved . . . and very . . . quiet and..and unassuming. I can just picture him, looking around, trying to figure out what in the world to do with this child, but not saying a word. I swear, he wouldn't have spoken up in an emergency room if he had a hatchet in his head.”
Andy Moody nodded, listening, urging me on.
I paused, the memory poised at the edges of my mind . . . but hazy. I didn't really know if it was an actual memory, or if I had just pictured it so many times that it felt that way. “Anyway, eventually a woman came for the little girl. Jimmy thought maybe the little girl was lost and had climbed into the booth on her own. But from the way the woman acted, she had laid the little girl down in the booth on purpose, and let her sleep while she went off and played the slots.”
Detective Bowles shook his head in disbelief. “And this little girl was you.”
“Yes,” I said frankly. I proceeded to tell him what Cheryl had told me, about Jimmy's belief that my mother had followed him back to his trailer and about the faulty passenger side door. I told him how I'd been found the next morning, how Jimmy had recognized me, and how he hadn't known what to do. “A few days later, the cops showed up at the truckstop, showing a flyer with the woman's face on it, asking about a child. The owner of the truckstop, who had purchased some carvings from Jimmy and was fairly friendly with him, told him the woman had turned up dead at local hotel. The cops had come around because the woman was wearing a T-shirt with the truckstop logo on it. At that point, Jimmy moved on and took me with him.”
By this point, Detective Bowles was scribbling wildly, his eyes darting up from his paper to my face as I spoke.
“Bottom line, my mother abandoned me at a truckstop in Reno. She turned up dead in a motel in the area a few days later. With that information, I wondered if you could find out who she was.”
Detective Bowles stared at me, his jaw working, blinking rapidly. He didn't have a great poker face. “Do you know approximately when this would have been?”
“August. I always thought my birthday was August 2. But how would Jimmy have known when my birthday was? I think he just marked my birthday by the day my mother abandoned me. I can't be sure of that, but it's my best guess. Cheryl said she thought I was about two when this all went down. It would have to have been 1992 or 1993. Does that help?”
“Yeah. It does. August of '92 or '93. Hotel room. Missing child. T-shirt with a truckstop logo. What else can you give me? Anything at all?”
“She was young . . . maybe younger than I am now.” The thought had struck me often in the last few months. “She was Native American, like Jimmy. I think that might be one of the reasons she left me with him.” Maybe I was kidding myself. But it was something to hold onto.
“I'm gonna make some calls. This case was obviously never solved because they never found you, did they? Reno P.D. will have to hit the archives, do a little digging, might take a few days, but we'll find out who your mother was, Blue.”
“And find out who I am.”
Detective Bowles stared at me and then slowly shook his head, as if the realization was staggering. “Yeah. You poor girl. And we'll find out who you are, too.”
“I'm going to Reno.”
“Reno?”
“Reno, Nevada.” Wilson was British. Maybe he didn't know where Reno was. “It's in Nevada, but it's way up North. It's about an eight hour drive. I could fly, but I'm too far along for that to be safe. I don't even know it they'd let me on a plane.”
“Why Reno?”
“I went to the police department on Monday.”
Wilson's eyes widened and he was very still.